Abstract
WHEN IRISH criminal investigators couldn’t identify a dismembered body, parts of which they found around a canal near Dublin in the spring of 2005, Wolfram Meier-Augenstein got a phone call. An analytical chemist at James Hutton Institute, in Dundee, Scotland, Meier-Augenstein has pioneered a way to help determine where unidentified victims like this one lived or traveled. To do so, he measures the stable isotope ratios of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur found in samples of the victim’s hair, teeth, nail, and bone. Checking these elements’ isotope ratios against databases that contain global isotope abundances can provide investigators with the victim’s probable trajectory during his or her last weeks, months, and years. In the case of the Dublin body, “the Irish investigators had several leads, but they were all equally probable,” Meier-Augenstein says. But his isotope data pointed to a likely home area for the victim. Following that lead, the police eventually identified the ...
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